I am delighted today to welcome Minister of DHERST, Francis Marus to our campus. A few days ago on Monday, we opened the 52nd Academic Year of the PNGUoT. 52 years is a long time, in fact we were founded 10 years before PNG became independent.

You may not realize that among the 10 or so oldest institutions in the world, over half of them are universities. Some of our partner universities in Europe, the University of Bologna for example is more than 900 years old, and arguably the oldest university in the world.

Welcome all to our Taraka Campus today, where tomorrow's leaders are forged.

Hereby, I declare the Academic Year 2017 officially opened.

Vice Chancellor Schram opening the 52nd Academic Year

UNITECH First Year Students

Today, we are all even more delighted than usual at the opening of the academic year to see our incoming first year students and that we got this far. Last year we almost did not finish the academic year, and we had to cancel many of our events and activities. We are happy that we left the 2016 academic year behind, and can run a normal academic year this year, with two 15 weeks semesters.

About Me

Committed to making a real difference by leading positive change in higher education.

For over 10 years
from 1993-2004, I worked in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean
in the field of environmental and sustainable development policy, and
environmental economics. My research interest is the role of technology and private business in the development of countries.

As an academic I have 17 peer review publications in various humanities and social sciences disciplines, supervised 5 PhD students and 18 Masters thesis.

As a consultant I worked as head of the environmental
studies department of SIDE, S.A. a consultancy company with
office in Mexico City, San José, and Lima I worked closely together
with many government organizations and private companies. For the World Bank’s Economic Development Institute I carried out two regional studies on sustainable development policies. For the European Commission I wrote one report on corporate social responsiblity, and one on the green economy for the European External Action Service.

Currently, I am Vice-Chancellor or Chief Executive Officer of the Papua New Guinea University of Papua New Guinea, in Lae.